White House wants to help you "blog anonymously"

The White House has announced a new initiative aimed at bringing the federal government into the online identity space in a major way. Via a post on the White House blog, the administration has announced the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).

The blog post has a link to a new Department of Homeland Security-hosted site for the initiative, which has already been seeded with suggestions that can be ranked via Reddit-style voting. The site also contains a link to an initial draft [PDF] of the strategy, and DHS is encouraging interested parties to submit comments on the draft.

The basic idea behind the proposal is the creation of a trusted "Identity Ecosystem," where users, businesses, and the government can voluntarily carry out transactions secure in the knowledge that everyone is who they say they are, and where users don't have to give up any more information than is necessary to complete a transaction.